It was five-thirty. He would leave at six, come what may. Meanwhile, every second that passed only made him angrier at the silence in which they were sitting. And yet how could he have refused such a rare opportunity, even if opposed by his wife? Galya, too, seemed to have grown suddenly aware of the situation. With a movement he found touching, she fingered the rip in her blouse as if to protect herself against this comforter who had come not only to comfort.
He studied her pale, slightly swollen face, on which, the day Ofer announced their engagement, he had allowed himself, following his wife’s lead, to plant a kiss—the first of many whenever they met.
“The fact is,” he began, “that you don’t deserve this visit from me.” His openly aggressive tone surprised and pleased him. “You caused us a great deal of sorrow and disappointment. Not so much by the separation you imposed on Ofer—you had every right to do as you saw fit—as by running away without saying good-bye, let alone explaining why you broke up a marriage we mistakenly thought was a happy one.”
Galya was caught off guard. The hand fingering the blouse fell to her side.
“Even if that’s so,” she admitted in a low tone, “and I did run away, it was because of the friendship and trust we had between us. There was nothing I could tell you. Not because there was nothing to say, but because there was no way of saying it. . . .”
“I don’t understand.”
“Ofer must have told you something.”
“No. Nothing concrete. Nothing that made any sense. . . .”
A wave of relief appeared to pass over her. She blushed with emotion. “Then he must have had his reasons.”
“Not at all,” Rivlin protested vigorously. “He wasn’t evading us or hiding anything, I’m sure of that. He simply had no idea what made you walk out on him with no warning.”
“No warning?” She smiled mockingly. “As if that were possible.”
“There were signs in advance?”
“Of course there were. There had to be.”
“Well, they must have been too subtle for us. In any case, I’m telling you—listen carefully—that Ofer couldn’t explain it. That was the reason he didn’t want to talk to us.”
“Then why keep trying to make him?” She was upset now.
“We stopped doing that long ago. It’s a subject we avoid. But even then, he feels our sadness and keeps away from it. . . .” He paused to phrase it more exactly. “I suppose I should say my sadness. I’m less able than Hagit to live with it, perhaps because Ofer is closer to me and more like me. I identify with him more. Listen. I’ll say it again. A long time has gone by. We’ve come to accept your divorce. But I still refuse to accept its mysteriousness. It keeps Ofer from freeing himself like you and meeting someone else.”
“You’re overstating it,” she accused him boldly, almost contemptuously. “There was nothing mysterious about it.”
“If there wasn’t, so much the better. Then you can explain to me right now what happened, and I’ll free myself, too.”
And he added softly after a brief silence:
“From you.”
“But why from me?” She seemed exasperated. “Why can’t you let things be? Maybe we discovered that we simply weren’t compatible. Isn’t that enough for you?”
“But you were compatible!” exclaimed the ex-father-in-law. “You still are. . . .”
“That’s not up to you to decide.” She narrowed her large, pretty eyes despairingly. “What do you want from me? If he didn’t tell you why we separated, he had his reasons.”
“Then you tell me!” He was growing more heated. “If it’s too intimate, or even . . . forgive me . . . too deep or complicated . . . perhaps sexual . . . something you don’t want me to know about . . . then tell Hagit. You know what a good listener she is. She’s wise and she’s honest and she’s loyal. Believe me, she keeps the darkest secrets from me as if she had been told them behind closed doors in a courtroom. She’ll keep yours, too.”
He felt relieved. Not simply because he had got it off his chest at last, but because his unstinting praise of his wife, who was no doubt furious at his disappearance, made up in part for this strange conversation that would only have aggravated her even more.
Galya tossed her head, eyeing him with distrust.
“What happened? Tell me!” He was losing his temper. “Why can’t you give me a straight answer? Or is it that you, too, don’t understand what you did?”
His open refusal to believe her set her on edge. She had lost a dearly loved father three days ago and now, still overwhelmed by it, needed all the tenderness she could get, not this cruel rebuff.
“But who says I owe you anything?” Her eyes blazed. “It’s over with. It’s all over with. I’ve remarried. If it were not for my father’s death, I could consider myself a happy woman. It’s your son’s own problem if he can’t free himself of me. It’s not mine. How old is he now, thirty-two? Thirty-three? If he still doesn’t know why I had to leave him, even though . . . even though I loved him a lot . . . then he has a problem. Maybe you do too. Maybe—who knows?—you’re even the cause of it. . . .”
25.
A QUARTER OF an hour had gone by. He had to stick to his schedule, especially because he might yet be caught in the rush-hour traffic leaving Jerusalem. But if this singular encounter ended now, with no resolution, he simply would have added to his old torment a new sense of missed opportunity.
His glance wandered to two pink-skinned Holy Land pilgrims who, undaunted by the chill evening air, were diving into the swimming pool that had replaced the old dance floor. On that floor, six years ago, a happy and ravishing young bride had determinedly approached a cerebral, middle-aged couple who hadn’t danced for so many years that they were as intimidated by the old dances as they were by the new ones. Hesitantly, Rivlin had let himself be coaxed, encouraged by the young people around him. He needn’t fear looking foolish, they assured him, because nowadays there were no rules. Next came the turn of his wife, dragged laughing onto the floor by her sons, so that midnight found the two of them pawing the air with their hands and feet like two endearingly wary bears. Mr. and Mrs. Hendel, whose long years in the hotel business had made them excellent dancers, cheered them on. After a while the same bride who now sat sullenly hunched before him had made them all join hands and dance in a circle around her.
“Suppose you’re right,” he said, trying to outflank the swift passage of time with a hurried admission. “Suppose, indirectly, we too had to do with the failure of your marriage. Isn’t that a reason why we deserve to understand what happened? It’s painful to think we’ve been kept in the dark when even your new husband knows all about it. It doesn’t matter if you’ve been inconsiderate or simply scared. As far as I’m concerned, it’s all the same.”
She said nothing, her resentful glance protesting—justifiably, he knew—the pitiless way he had turned a condolence call into a bill of indictment. His wife had been right again. The visit was ending with a pointless exacerbation of past wounds. In his despair he thrust a lance he hadn’t known he possessed.
“Listen, Galya. I’m in a hurry to get to the airport. And you have to rejoin your family. I just want to say that, though we haven’t spoken for five years, your father’s death is truly hard for me. . . . We’re no longer one family, and I wasn’t obliged to come today. Still, you see that I did anyway. This death is a double blow for me, because for five years—secretly, without telling Hagit, because she’s too proud to acknowledge her feelings—I’ve kept hoping that one day it would be possible to ask your father to help me to understand. I’ve always thought that he of all people, who loved you so much and was so attached to you, was the one to do it. . . .”
His reference to her dead father, he saw at once, only heightened her distress. She rose, the setting sun red on her eyes.
“My father knew nothing. And even if he had suspected something, he would never have revealed to anyone, not even my mother, a secret having to do with m
e. He respected me totally.”
“I know he did. Yet I’m convinced he would have agreed had he known. . . . What I’m trying to say is . . . had he known the truth about me. . . .”
“What truth?”
He made a supreme effort to pretend that his next words were no more his than the gray birds flying heedlessly above the pine trees he had played among as a child.
“The truth about my situation. I’m talking about my illness . . . because I don’t have much time left to live. I’m sure he would have taken that into account. . . .”
“You’re ill?”
“Yes,” he said. Unforeseen and absurd, the declaration was made calmly. “I haven’t much time left.”
In the time that remained his imagination wove a narrative of intricate arabesques out of the secret illness of Samaher, the pretended illness of her narghile-puffing grandmother, the actual and deadly illness of Mr. Hendel, who was presently hovering above the two believers in his resurrection who were splashing in the swimming pool, and the illness that he now invented, with its real pain and imaginary symptoms, for an internationally renowned Orientalist improvising a lecture on it from his fantasies.
“Yes,” he said again, lowering his gaze to avoid the eyes of the young woman he had forced to factor his death into her father’s. “It’s a fatal disease that my wife alone knows about—and believe me, she too doesn’t know everything. We haven’t told Ofer or his brother yet. For the time being, I’d rather spare them. I’m telling you this, while swearing you to secrecy, only to prick your conscience, if you have one, into helping me get at the truth, or at least your version of it. It’s not only for my son’s sake. It’s for my own inner peace as well.”
26.
STRANGELY, HOWEVER, HE did not insist on an immediate answer. As if they both needed time to recover from the shock of his revelation, he held out his hand in farewell while expressing the hope that his dramatic confession would not keep them from meeting again. The final moments were devoted by him to a few appreciative words about the deceased. Then, adding the wish that the family’s sorrow and bereavement might become a source of creation and strength, he gave Galya a light hug, as casually as in the old days, and planted a fatherly kiss on her cheek in testimony to the memories and reckonings that time could not erase. Her body clung to his warmly, as if his approaching death were now one with the death that had just taken place. Pressed against her, he realized with a start that she must be pregnant. He said nothing and hurried to his car. Although it was already five after six, he was sure he would make it to the airport on time.
The traffic out of Jerusalem wasn’t bad. At the Kiryat-Ye’arim gas station he stopped to phone the airport. The final time, it turned out, had retreated from its finality by forty more minutes, thus enabling him, if the traffic continued to flow, to drop by Raya’s. Apprehensive about contacting his wife, who might cross-examine him about the whys and wherefores of having stayed too long in a place he should never have been in, he preferred to call his sister. To his amazement, she told him that Hagit hadn’t tried to get in touch with him. Raya was in the middle of making cheese fritters, a favorite dish from their childhood, and impatient to know when he would arrive. “Are you sure you have enough time?” she inquired. That, he told her, depended on road conditions. “Even if I come,” he warned her, “it will only be to wash my hands and face and pop a fritter into my mouth. Then I’ll be off.”
27.
THE TABLE AT his sister’s was already set. Rinsing away the sick and the dead at the sink, he called Hagit before sitting down to eat—and found, not an anxious, irritated wife, but a soft and sleepy one, freshly awakened from a delicious afternoon nap, lengthened past the usual span of her naps by her fatigue and the absence of her husband’s habitually restless body from her side. “What’s happening? What time is it?” she asked, with the innocence of a pampered child granted a special indulgence. “How are you?” Her voice was full of concern for him. “Did you sleep or at least rest at Raya’s?” He maneuvered carefully between maintaining a fog of uncertainty around his movements and complaining about the world’s many demands on him. “How is your back?” Hagit wanted to know. “Is it better?” “A little,” he answered grudgingly, loath to forfeit her sympathy for a condition that had vanished and been forgotten long ago. There was no knowing when it might come in handy again.
“I want you to promise me one more time, darling. Be patient and nice with my sister.”
“Don’t worry. She’s one person I’m always nice to.”
“Be nicer than nice.”
“Trust me.”
“How was the shiva?”
“I’ll tell you later.”
“Just a hint.”
“It’s hard for them. Hendel’s wife is still in shock, just as I thought she’d be. She’s a wreck.”
“Did you talk to Galya?”
“Yes.”
“What about?”
“What does one talk about at such times? About her father. About death.”
“That’s all?”
“More or less.”
He shut his eyes, recalling his outrageous lie.
“I hope you didn’t raise the subject of Ofer.”
“Not exactly.”
“Not exactly what?” The judge was waking up.
“We’ll talk about it later, Hagit. Not now. You don’t want me to miss your sister’s flight.”
28.
HE WAS STILL prying open with a finger the shiny eyes of his sister’s granddaughter’s doll when a plate of golden fritters, their crisp warmth enclosing little slabs of fried cheese, was set before him. It never ceased to amaze him how, despite his sister’s indefatigable and never ending hatred of their mother, she continued to make all her dishes, as if determined to demonstrate how simple and even improvable they were. It wasn’t easy for him to resist an improved taste of his childhood. In the end he had to plead with her—just as he had pleaded with his mother in her day—to stop plying him with more fritters and to wrap them in aluminum foil for his sister-in-law, who was by now probably circling overhead.
As he had feared, however, it was half past eight before, weary and exhausted, he was able to hold yet another woman in his arms—the fifth of the day by his count, although without a doubt the prime mover of the five. He embraced her gingerly, knowing that her youthful-looking body, which, after a single miscarriage, had borne no children, was thin and fragile at the age of sixty. Five years his wife’s senior and a year older than himself, she stiffened self-protectively in the innocent embrace of a devoted brother-in-law who had spent the day on his way to the airport to welcome her.
Ofra herself had been en route from British Columbia for thirty hours. Yet her small, delicate face, rather than showing signs of tiredness, was lit by a spiritual elation only further refined by the six-hour delay for repairs in Dublin. She and her husband, Yo’el, who worked for the United Nations as a consultant on the agricultural economies of developing countries, were not only frequent flyers who had accumulated zillions of points with four different airlines, but also conscientious travelers who loved wandering through the duty-free shops of the world, the details of which they studied as intensely as if they were back in the Zionist youth movement, in which they had met in Tel Aviv, memorizing the clues of a treasure hunt.
What was the point of commiserating with an abused traveler who had enjoyed every minute of the flight and even managed to catch two or three catnaps that, however brief, more than rid her of her jet lag? And so without further ado they set out on the road to Haifa, over which the spring night had scattered its scents and lights, while he told her the latest news of his family, but especially of the young Army Intelligence officer, her favorite (if only because he was named for her father).
“Yo’el and I worry about him each time there’s an incident in Lebanon,” she said.
“It’s not him you need worry about,” Rivlin rebuked her, as if annoyed that the two Israeli émigr�
�s didn’t convey their concern over the situation in Lebanon to a more appropriate address. “I’ve explained to you several times that he’s at a well-guarded base in the Galilee. If this entire country were to go up in smoke, he’d be the last to be affected. He wouldn’t even hear the screams.”
Ofra didn’t crack a smile. Like her sister, she disapproved of fantasies of violence, even ones designed solely to illustrate how safe her nephew was. She and her husband, though gone from Israel for over thirty years, still considered themselves temporary absentees entitled to demand of those who had remained behind that they take good care of the country.
“I still don’t understand what he does there.”
“You can’t get anything out of him. If you ask me, he’s listening to the radio communications of Syrian pilots. Maybe they’ll tell us what’s going to happen in the Middle East.”
“All in Arabic?”
“Unfortunately, that’s the language the Syrians use.”
“He knows it that well?”
“Well enough to know he’s hearing it. And also, I hope, to understand it.”
“You wait and see, Yochi. He’ll end up an Arabist like his father.”
“What for? So that he can be driven to despair? Who needs it?”
She dropped her eyes without answering. “Despair,” as his brother-in-law Yo’el told them candidly, was a taboo word at the conferences on developing economies, which were held in the most hopeless of deteriorating countries, that he regularly attended in the loyal company of his wife.
Rivlin switched on the radio. Perhaps a brief exposure to the hourly news bulletin would help acclimatize his passenger to the homeland she hadn’t been in for three years. In fact, he doubted whether she would have come now, had it not been for a wedding in Yo’el’s family. The two of them were inseparable. If he, for his part, took her along with him into his conference rooms as if she were an agricultural expert herself, she returned the compliment by letting him attend her sessions at the beauty parlor, where he sat reading a newspaper on a revolving chair by her side while giving advice to the hairdresser. Their mutual dependence was so great that he had taken to putting his driver’s license and credit cards in her purse, leaving only a few coins in his pocket like a small boy’s allowance. He had agreed with reluctance to Ofra’s coming to Israel two weeks before him, during which time he would have to go around with his own wallet.
The Liberated Bride Page 7